Four Approaches to Discontent

So, let's say we've proven that now are the zombies of our discontent. What's an angry young radical to do? How does one cope with total dissatisfaction with the structure of society? There are four approaches:

Revolution: Vive la aformentioned, comrade! Revolution is a hoot. Everybody get worked up, or at least a significant force of guerillas, and things get overthrown... but then it's up to you to implement the whole thing at once, and this is very complicated, especially if you are merely a right-handed pitcher with an enthusiasm for cigars and rambling speeches. Also, even if you intend to primarily work through violence, you are going to need a sympathetic public. This requires some fairly specific conditions, and a revolutionary without popular support is just a terrorist. Of course, you can go the non-violent route. There are both practical and ethical reasons to do this. Plus, you need to do something to get people angry while you are waiting around for the proper historical dialectic. Of course, some folks would rather avoid all that mess, which leads them to...

Gradualism: Hey look, a system for enacting change! Assuming you live in a more-or-less constitutional republic, you may be fortunate enough to live in a society that can adapt to the will of the people before they pull out the torches and pitchforks. The election of Barack Obama has of course significantly bouyed this sentiment in the USA. After all, gradualism does require that "change for the better" be a plausible concept. "Listening to reason" is also a popular catchphrase. Gradualism requires a lot of compromise -- it helps if you do not shoot anyone -- and continued pressure from the public. For this reason, you need a public that is not overwhelmingly distracted by shiny objects... Gradualists tend to support education as well. Of course, when your plan for success involves raising the next generation to be more likely to support change, you are admitting that things do not look so hot in the near-term. That's gradualism.

Seperatism: Of course, you could just say fuck that and start your own society, with blackjack and hookers -- or bigamy. And that's why we have Nevada and Utah. Separatism covers everything from survivalist militias to hippie communes. But unlike the previous approaches, which require popular support, anybody and his five smelly friends can be separatist. Pure seperatism is difficult, as it requires total self-sufficiency, but as long as you're content to interact with a corrupt capitalist/carnivorous/Godless/one-corner-world system only sporadically, you have a lot of options. Perhaps you can even serve as an example to others, although then your ideas will need to scale to a real society. I mean, we can't all be bigamists, can we? The answer, surprisingly, is yes, but it involves some rather complicated social graphs. We can expect a real resurgence in separatism if we ever figure out how to cheaply colonize space (or even the oceans). It's the same "free land -> anarchy" equation I laid out for the Internet -- and frankly, life on a hydroponic Rastafarian space station doesn't sound all that bad. Still, be sure you can afford to import soap.

Apathy: On the other hand, you may not give a shit. Sometimes change doesn't seem that plausible, and you can't get yourself worked up enough to leave your family and friends for Mars or South Dakota (Mars is the red one). Well, apathy is for you, my friend, no matter how upset it's going to make George Orwell. He will not be coming to your birthday party. Or maybe there's no hope for change and you have no means of separation -- but this is pretty rare, and you should maybe go check on your broke, oppressed neighbors and see if they don't really want to go for option #1. Unless of course you're in a police state and can't trust them not to turn you in. In this case, it is probably best to feign apathy and keep one eye on the nearest source of asylum at all times. Apathy is only really viable when things are really, tremendously shite, or when they aren't that bad at all. But it is an option, so I've included it.

Unexpected Chart Comic

Yeah, it needs a little editing.

Democracy is Not the Issue Here, Part 2

Continuing our nascent foray into social theory blogging... with another ridiculous wall of text:

I concluded my first post by claiming that "money buys noise". But first, let's take a closer look at Digg and other aggregators, and then onto "long-tail" theory and its supposed rebuttals.

Digg, unlike many sites, is straightforwardly democratic: users vote various pages up or down. For popular items there is a feedback loop: items with more positive votes are displayed more prominently, and thus have a greater opportunity to receive votes. It's negative voting that presents the most problems, however, as it allows controversial items to be denied significant consideration. As a result, we would expect the average successful item to have a broad base of appeal be quickly digestible (no Digg item that takes more than one sitting to process will have any success). I have no extensive experience with Digg, so I'll leave the final analysis to others. The governmental analog is a kind of collectivized democracy, a cross between classical Athens and Soviet Russia... with a nod to the immediacy and frivolity of the 24-hour news cycle.

As an adjunct to anarchy, Digg is not terribly troublesome; as long as there exist Diggers who are exploring the Internet in depth, uncommon items will have at least have an opportunity to rise. As a content aggregator, Digg is supposed to make interesting content easier to find; the complexity of the interlinked web is reduced to a single, linear space. The argument against this is that it reduces an infinite homesteader-style prairie into a crowded tenement (with a penthouse on top). It certainly does make things easier-to-find, though... Ah, there it is. If you like what comes to the top, Digg improves the signal-to-noise ratio of the Internet. But if the things on Digg are so common that you've already seen them, you aren't going to stick around (or do you? and do you vote them up or down?). If the aggressive explorers abandon the site, this should produce a vicious cycle of ever-more-limited content and ever-less-intrepid content locators.

Of course, it should not surprise anyone that popular things are more popular than unpopular things, but there has been a great deal of sturm and drang over just what the coefficients should be in this equation. Chris Anderson of Wired is credited with coining the term "long-tail" theory, to describe the phenomenon where, on the web, it is possible to profit from selling a large number of unpopular works. For example, let's look at this counterpoint from the Wall Street Journal, that constant friend to egalitarian theories:

"By Mr. Anderson's calculation, 25% of Amazon's sales are from its tail, as they involve books you can't find at a traditional retailer. But using another analysis of those numbers -- an analysis that Mr. Anderson argues isn't meaningful -- you can show that 2.7% of Amazon's titles produce a whopping 75% of its revenues. Not quite as impressive."

I hope what you're taking away from this is that the glass is clearly half-empty, and that Amazon sell a lot of books -- millions of titles in fact. Amazon sells over 25 million different titles, 2.7% of which is about 675,000. Quick, how many books fit in the average bookstore? This is not exactly the New York Times best-seller list. And it fails to consider the most important question: how did these books become part of the privileged 2.7%? How many of them were at one point part of the tail? And, and one more thing... Are they any good?

Back to that in a minute. I have someone to be angry at, the writer of this Slate article :

But according to Elberse, that sort of anecdote is the exception. The reason? We're not very adventurous. Elberse examined the rental habits of customers at Quickflix, a Netflix-like service in Australia. She found that no group of customers exhibited "a particular taste for the obscure." Sure, a small number of customers regularly rented films from deep in the catalog—but they tended to be people who watched a lot of movies generally and so had much more "capacity" for venturing into the Long Tail. And still they chose a lot of hits: The most widely traveling Quickflix customers picked only 8 percent of their rentals from the least popular of available titles and 34 percent from among blockbusters.

Science journalism is doomed. We aren't given anything to tie those percentages to. We're given a lot of arbitrary mosts and leasts. But let me pull a Wall Street Journal here: there is some portion of Australian mail-service film-renters, for whom two-thirds of the movies they watch are not "blockbusters." And of course, that's ignoring that such a service appeals to people who watch a lot of films (because it is monthly), and encourages them to watch films indiscriminately (because they can get as many as they want). But let's just look at that "particular taste for the obscure" line. Of course there won't be such a group... if I take the sum of all people who watched a film of (let's say) 92% obscurity, I am actually taking the average of several different obscure tastes. Where do I end up? the center! magic! Whereas if I take the group of all people who have watched rented no "blockbusters," clearly, I have such a group. Furthermore, movies are probably the most homogenized major media.

You want a long tail success story? Talk to someone whose business model didn't exist fifteen years ago. Talk to a guy selling T-shirts for a living, while providing content for free. Talk to some guys who can raise millions of dollars because they make funny pictures about video games. Yes, webcomics are our cultural standard-bearers. God bless 'em.

Wait, actually, let's look at films... why are there films that everyone has seen? Because people are only aware of movies that are showing in theaters, which are large, expensive buldings to establish and maintain. Theaters want to be assured that the movies they show will attract an audience. They want a professional movie. This requires cameras, technicians, stagehands, extras, and a whole infrastructure that simply is not required to write Finnegan's Wake. They want professional actors, preferably famous, so that you don't need to spend any effort convincing people you have good actors. They want a professional marketing campaign, so that no matter how lousy the movie is, people will see it before word-of-mouth sinks it. By the way, did I mention money buys noise?

The businesses of advertising is almost wholly based on this. Word of mouth is the gold-standard form of buzz, because by definition it comes from known, trusted sources. The hyperlink structure of the web is modeled on academic citation, which is just a more rigorous version of word of mouth. In recent years, as advertising audiences have become more sophisticated, cynical, or perhaps just overstimulated, advertisers have gone to greater and greater lengths to inspire trust (hint: you should not trust them). Of course, people know you shouldn't trust advertisers, which has inspired disguised advertisements or "guerrilla marketing," the goal of which is to inject advertisement into a normally trusted or at least independent source -- paid bloggers, press releases disguised as journalism. This tactic is also favored by spammers and computer viruses, e.g., sending the virus to everyone in your e-mail address book. The citizens of the Athenian democracy knew it as the "Trojan horse" tactic. Taken to its logical conclusion, "guerrilla marketing" eventually produces the total breakdown of society as we know it -- by gradually voiding every source of information beyond your immediate social circle. Hooray?

Okay, that's a little far-fetched, because we have things like the Better Business Bureau and people are still furious when you violate their trust. And maybe I'm being a little hasty in autamatically categorizing advertising as "noise" (shameless falsehood, if you prefer). Advertising can contain information: the name of the product, various facts about it. You may be interested in the product. But you probably aren't -- and you can't trust those facts without independent verification (information that is part-right wastes far more time than bald-faced lies). At least you shouldn't trust them, because businesses are sociopaths.

Not that I think the average businessperson is a sociopath -- possibly a greater percentage than the human average, due to selection bias -- but large, publicly-owned companies (the kind best positioned to put money into advertising) are large, complicated entities with highly abstracted chains of responsibility. Most include in their charter a clause which promises to "maximize shareholder value." This encourages company executives to put stock price above all other concerns, for fear they may be sued otherwise. If a corporation is to be considered legally a person, it must be conceded that rarely is anyone in position to act as a conscience. Now, corporations are not evil: they are very specifically sociopaths -- for my purposes, this means having no empathy but stil having ability to feign empathy if it provides advantage. In a system that does not actively prevent it, sociopathic businesses will be the most successful, as they have no moral restrictions to their actions.

Now, suppose you are a sociopath in a position of power, and that your products occupy a dominant position in the marketplace. Will you focus on providing accurate information to consumers? Rationally, you should attempt to build arbitrary brand loyalty and discourage the use or even awareness of your competitors. You do this by, respectively, exaggerating differences in your product (to prevent commodification) and disparaging all attributes of your competitor. Both of these are noisy. In fact, it is in your interest to generally increase the amount of noise in all channels. As the established player, you are in favor of the status quo, so any free flow of accurate information has potentially negative consequences on your market share. So, for example, by taking control of one channel of information and spreading doubt and uncertainty about other channels, you can easily make it far too difficult for people to bother.

As examples, which just occurred to me in force, I present to you A) the demonization of bloggers by the mainstream media, and B) the demonization of the mainstream media by Republican talk radio types.

Epiphanies aside, this should demonstrate that long-tail theory is not necessarily a fact of human existence -- it's a fact of a capitalist economy with significant information inefficiencies. At the very least, this should have a severe effect on the rate of change in the "hump" of the popularity curve, which in turn would flatten the long-term shape of the curve.

Democratic systems on the Internet are almost certainly more homogeneous than anarchical/networked systems, but we can't say by how much unless we have a way to remove external stabilizing/noise-creating forces from the system.

One more quick thought: for the general benefit, it is necessary to construct systems of laws that do not advantage sociopaths. To the extent that a system allows money to be accumulated by sociopaths, and moreso to the extent that the system allows money to be converted into power, that system is primed for failure (not collapse, necessarily, but failure to "promote the general welfare," as the Constitution puts it). This suggests, at minimum, that all political campaigns should be publicly financed and that there should be strict oversight of political advertisement. On the more general point of "noise-pollution" in information channels, the solution is more difficult, but should involve tighter truth-in-advertising laws, a rigorous and even-handed fourth estate, and most importantly a cultural movement towards intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, and the absolute refusal to tolerate being lied to.

Democracy is Not the Issue Here

As my colleague Ethan has been kind enough to supply me with a starting point, I will attempt to refute him.

He correctly points out the problems of unabridged democracy, but he fails to consider the defining factors of the internet. Let's take two of the primary missions of government: protecting its citizens and maintaining an orderly distribution of resources.

Firstly, individuals on the Internet are incapable of harming each other in any serious fashion*. To the extent that the Internet mirrors the Athenian forum, each of us is maneuvering across it in a little bullet-proof Pope-mobile, which is also blessed with the power of teleportation. The potential for tyranny of the majority here is rather limited.


Governments also concern themselves with the distribution of various limited resources. And from the territorial perspective, the Internet is without bounds. Land is cheap and the construction of any edifice is limited purely by time and the skill of the architect. Anyone** can have a website, and even more so a blog, MySpace profile, Facebook account, Youtube videos. These are all proprietary services, of course, but they are all products of the cheap-space economy. So if communities can't control what you own, where you are, or what you do, what do you have to fear from government?

Well, alright, it is possible to restrict movement on the internet, as the government of China is happy to demonstrate -- you just need to control or have leverage on the entire infrastructure. This, of course, is the reason for net-neutrality advocacy -- to pressure actual governments into preserving the Internet as a level playing field with a low entry cost. ISPs, Governments, and backbone providers all have the ability to change the "laws" of the internet, but from the internal perspective these are more like physical laws.

But really, what I am trying to get across is that the Internet isn't a democracy, it's an anarchy -- at least for the individual consumer. From the view of a business, it is far more of a democracy. That's the beauty of advertising revenues -- everyone's eyeballs are assumed to be equally valuable (They aren't, especially if you want to get statistical, but it's close enough). A retailer or content provider may very well consider itself at risk of being voted out of existence if no one uses their site. But this is just capitalism layered on top of anarchy. A slightly different mechanism holds for sites dependent upon community acceptance or involvement, such as Wikipedia. Although in raw form, Wiki editing is fairly anarchical as well -- it's only when you zoom out to an extended time frame that the results look democratic.

So if your options are unlimited and no one can tell you what to do, where's the catch? In a word: noise. The currency of the Internet is information. You can go anywhere, but you need to know how to get there, and you need to derive some utility from what you find there. Utility here is anything from lower prices on bulk sorghum to intellectual debate to pictures of cats -- assuming you wanted pictures of cats. If you wanted pictures of cats and I give you hardcore pornography, your interests are not being served. Because of this, search engines are the biggest enablers of the Internet as we know it.

The search engine is an inherently meritocratic idea; your position is determined by your relevance to the question at hand. As a website owner, you don't need to do anything beyond create the site. Just be relevant, and Google or Yahoo or MSN will come find you and tell people you've got what they want -- and these people will tell their friends, and link you on their blogs or Facebooks or what-have-you. Even better, these days, most engines (Google most notably) will account for this word-of-mouth support by increasing your relevance score. At least in theory. Now back to that bit about noise.

Noise is anything bad (subjectively) that gets mixed in with what you want (the signal). If your information is noisy, it costs you more time to pick out the signal. If you can't effectively search for what you want, you just aren't going to bother. This is why no one tries to get a date by flipping through the phone book. Actually, that one is noisy both ways -- you probably wouldn't want to date someone who cold-called you from the phone book (which makes you less likely to try). It's also why no one is reading this essay by this point. And this is why advertising is the most dangerous thing for the egalitarian internet. Money buys noise.

I'm going to stop there before this becomes completely unwieldy, and expand on this in another post. Suffice to say, I don't see democracy as the problem. "Of course not," you may say, "Dumb people are the problem." Nope, not even them. Part 2 coming soon, I hope. Christ! Why is analyzing society from the ground up so complicated?

*Identity theft and fraud being the exceptions -- and this will play into my larger point.

**Above a fairly low economic threshold, at least in the developed world.